March 31, 2018

By Connor Blenkinsop, CoinTelegraph
A peer-to-peer online learning platform is gearing up to bring the “out of date” education sector into the 21st century by becoming a one-stop shop for tutors and students. Blockchain-based NTOK says its ecosystem helps to fundraise education and removes geographical hurdles for teachers and pupils – and will offer a high-quality learning environment furnished with textbooks and courses from prominent publishers. The concept is already being put to the test, with an Alpha version of the platform being used as an online English language school. NTOK executives say they are obtaining “rapid feedback” from users so extra features can be developed. Although the company is planning to specialize in foreign languages, other offerings will include pre-school education, supplementary learning for primary and secondary school students and courses in coding and Blockchain.

Steph YoungGonzaga credits online learning with enriching her education and helping establish herself as an IT thought leader. YoungGonzaga recently returned to her roots. She pivoted her career in order to focus on supporting students who, just as she did, are pursuing their education online. As Assistant Professor and Program Chair at the Forbes School of Business and Technology at Ashford University—a fully online university—she developed the new Master of Information Systems Management degree program. Today, she’s focused on giving students the hands-on experience and peer connections they need to become the the next wave of IT leaders. A key part of her arsenal? Virtual labs.

Cornell has made 12 MOOCs ranging a variety of subjects. Some of the most successful have been in the sciences, notably “Sharks! Global Biodiversity, Biology, and Conservation” conducted by Prof. William E. Bemis, ecology and evolutionary biology. His four-week-long course, which uses a combination of brief informational videos and interactive exercises to apply new concepts, aims to give participants an introduction to shark biology and conservation. The course has attracted “more than 25,000 learners to date from more than 180 countries,” according to Bemis and has an extremely high completion rate, something many MOOCs have failed to achieve.

March 30, 2018

IBM kicked off its Think 2018 conference today with a bombshell announcement: It has made the world’s smallest computer, and it’s designed from the ground up to work with the blockchain. The computer itself is smaller than a single grain of salt, coming in at 1 millimeter by 1 millimeter and reportedly has about the same computing power as a 1990s era CPU. “The world’s smallest computer is an IBM-designed edge device architecture and computing platform that is smaller than a grain of salt will cost less than ten cents to manufacture, and can monitor, analyze, communicate, and even act on data,” IBM claims. “It packs several hundred thousand transistors into a footprint barely visible to the human eye and can help verify that a product has been handled properly throughout its long journey.”

Many young students grew up with a joystick in their hands, so Texas A&M University has developed a sophisticated video game aimed to make calculus class a little less daunting. Following on the heels of offering its first game-based course in art history in fall, the university this semester is piloting a game-based calculus class in which the game is the course. Students use calculus fundamentals to complete quests and face virtual obstacles throughout the 3-D game, said Paula Lima-Filho, a mathematician at Texas A&M, who helped develop the game.

In just three years, Dr. Dustyn Williams has helped build OnLineMedEd to annual revenue of $3.5 million. Now, he’s looking to expand the mission of the company from training medical students to providing online courses in a range of fields. Williams, a physician at Baton Rouge General Medical Center who serves as a faculty member for the medical center’s internal medicine residency program, helped launch OnlineMedEd in 2014. The company offers medical education to about 75,000 unique email addresses each month. While the core videos are free, OnlineMedEd makes its money by selling “freemium” content, such as lessons that prepare students for medical residencies and continuing education classes. “Medical knowledge belongs to no one,” Williams said. “If you have an internet connection, you can get the fundamentals.”

March 29, 2018

By Networks Asia
Almost half (48%) of Singapore business leaders believe they’ll have more job satisfaction in the future by offloading the tasks they don’t want to do to machines, while 52% disagree, finds research conducted by Vanson Bourne. Findings pointed towards how a truly mutually beneficial partnership is on the cards – if businesses prepare accordingly. Machines will assume work functions in finance, inventory, logistics, administration, customer service, marketing, HR, medical care and more to alter the course of education. Society will enter a new phase that will be characterized by “in the moment” learning as the pace of change will be so rapid that new industries will be created and new skills will be required to survive. A majority (97%) believe that technology will change the way we learn by 2030, globally.

by Robert Leyland, Merkle
Of all the industries that blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt, education seems like one of the least obvious. However, current education systems are not keeping pace with technological developments, leaving students out in the cold. BitDegree’s concept is simple. Technology is outpacing the development of educational courses in traditional educational institutions. Therefore, the company seeks to provide the highest quality courses available to bridge an identified gap between employers’ needs and the current offerings of universities and higher education institutions. BitDegree likes to think of their platform as a merged version of Coursera and HackerRank.

Augmented Reality (AR) in which virtual content is incorporated with real-world scenarios, is an emerging trend in the field of workplace learning and development. It is a way of bridging the gap between real and digital world by superimposing virtual images with the information of real world. With the use of smartphones, tablets and other personalized devices, an immense potential of AR has started to be explored.

March 28, 2018

To get a bead on opportunities in the field of business analytics education, Montclair State University turned to a team of internal data experts to figure out what a new education program should cover — the very same people who would eventually be teaching its courses. In a paper published in 2015 in Information Systems Education Journal, three faculty members described how they used data to map out curriculum for a proposed business analytics program. Development of this kind of program was being undertaken in a highly competitive atmosphere. As the paper noted, graduate and undergraduate programs on business analytics had already been introduced at 130 institutions in just the previous five years. What set this effort apart, however, was its intended emphasis on “competency-based instruction” — if they could pinpoint just what that meant in this context.

If you’re transitioning to teaching students online, then you’re possibly in one of two camps: you’re resistant because you believe face-to-face teaching is better, or you’re resigned because you know it is a matter of when, not if. Finding a truly passionate distance educator in a field where much of the learning has to be practical (how to write, use a camera, record sound) has, in my experience, been difficult. Most people design curriculum with the on-campus student in mind, and then make amendments for the distance student. “Designing authentic learning tasks that facilitate connections requires you to be innovative, particularly in the ways you provide feedback and support to students without overwhelming yourself.” However, journalism education by distance seems a natural fit. Journalists routinely have to work remotely, receiving briefs from editors thousands of miles away. They create and file stories using a diverse range of technologies, and need to be mobile, adaptable, social and able to negotiate complexity when conducting research.

In the new report, “Bias in Online Classes: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” researchers looked into whether or not students and instructors displayed racial or gender biases in online courses. In 124 different MOOCs, the authors “tested for the presence of racial and gender biases in these settings by creating fictional student identities with racial- and gender-connotative names, having these fictional students place randomly assigned comments in the discussion forums, and observing the engagement of other students and instructors with these comments.”

March 27, 2018

By Autumn A. Arnett, Education Dive
eCornell CEO Paul Krause said his organization, which started as an entrepreneurial unit of Cornell University’s main campus and now provides much of the institution’s online infrastructure and marketing, has laid out a model for massive open online course (MOOCs) providers to look to as an example for monetization. Personalization is important, said Krause during a conversation in Austin last week. Even in an online or blended space, he said, offering relevant, engaging experiences is the best way to get the desired outcomes for the average students. To achieve the needed level of personalization, Krause said instructors and course designers should find ways to embed high levels of peer-to-peer interaction, even within online modules, and incorporate course examples that are timely and relevant to students.

Some striking recent statistics indicate that while 92% of educators say that they would like to use more edtech in their classroom in the future (because they believe it enhances student engagement and learning outcomes) and yet only 14% of them actually use digital learning materials on a week by week basis. College professors account for a large proportion of the educators who, though they appreciate the value of edtech, do not actually use it to teach. So why is there such apathy or resistance toward edtech in the higher education classroom?

The University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA) has launched a program to recognize excellence in online higher education: the Hallmarks of Excellence in Online Leadership Review. The program evaluates online education programs based on seven key elements, such as internal advocacy, entrepreneurial initiative and faculty support, and then issues Credly digital badges to qualifying colleges and universities.

March 26, 2018

As described on the Cousera website, their new online Bachelor of Science in Computer Science degree will be offered by the University of London. Students will “learn in-demand computing skills,” develop their “abilities to solve complex problems,” and nurture both their innovation and creativity. They will also develop “real-world computer science skills” by developing their own software projects. Subject areas owill include Machine Learning, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Web Development, Virtual Reality, and Game Development. The degree is expected to launch in April 2019, pending approval by the University of London.

Udacity has quietly scrapped its pledge, nixing the program, which guaranteed a job within six months of graduation or 100 percent of students’ money back, at the end of last year. Announced with much fanfare, the job guarantee applied to Udacity’s Nanodegree Plus program, an enhanced version of the nanodegree with access to a career adviser and career concierge services. Udacity stopped accepting new enrollments into the Nanodegree Plus program in December 2017, and the program will come to a complete end in June. The program was priced at $299 a month ($100 more than a regular nanodegree) and was available in four areas — Android developer, iOS developer, machine learning engineer and senior web developer. Udacity says on its website that most nanodegrees take students between six months and a year to complete.

Artificial intelligence is becoming a part of our daily reality, so we should anticipate it making changes in the realm of education. We are already becoming invested in our personal AI assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, and we are eagerly awaiting self-driving vehicles. What was once only considered a future possibility is here – and it is here to stay. According to research, the compound annual growth rate of artificial intelligence in education is expected to be “47.50% during the period 2017-2021.” That’s a huge leap! As our lives become more intertwined with technology and AI, it will also follow students into the classroom. And, it just may be what the US Education system needs.

March 25, 2018

The majority of online students live within 100 miles of the university in which they are enrolled. According to a report updated in 2017 by College Atlas, the figure stands at 80%. Only 1 in 5 online students live far away from their campus. What’s more, the proportion of online students who live near their university has only grown in recent years. A 2016 survey of online college students by Learning House and Aslanian Market Research found that, among undergraduates, 57% lived less than 50 miles away, while 17% were between 50-100 miles out. Four years earlier, in 2012, those figures stood at 47% and 16%, respectively. The growth was even greater for graduate students.

MERLOT, the granddaddy of open educational resources developed by the California State University system, has entered its third decade of operation with a new facelift. The project, as always, provides a gateway to OER. But with its newest release, search functionality has been expanded and coding has been done using responsive web design to make it mobile device-friendly.

This week, an English professor at Loyola University New Orleans penned an article for Inside Higher Ed titled “Why I Won’t Teach Online.” Professor Christopher Schaberg acknowledged that he used the internet for many things, and that there were several benefits of online courses. At Loyola College New Orleans, tuition alone is nearly $40,000 per year. In many other institutions it’s even higher. It’s a cliché to say that many professors are out of touch with current technology that could aid them in the lecture hall. But as Professor Schaberg demonstrates, his colleagues are actually more out of touch with the socioeconomic realities of college-going learners in the U.S. He is by no means alone. A study released by Inside Higher Ed and Gallup in the fall of 2017 found that one third of university professors oppose teaching their courses online, while another third remain ambivalent on the subject.